For the past few weeks, Uzma Qayyum has been shuttled from shelter to shelter by the Islamabad Sessions Court where her case has been pending. At the hearing conducted at the end of January, Judge Nazir Ahmed Gajana had ordered shifting the girl from the Darul Aman Centre where she had been ordered to go earlier in the month to the Benazir Bhutto Shelter Home and Crisis Centre.

The new shelter offered counseling services, something pertinent and necessary in Uzma’s case since her father had alleged that she had been brainwashed.

As I wrote in an earlier article entitled 'Women and militancy', Uzma Qayyum’s case began last June when one evening she did not return home from the madrassa which she attended, and which is an affiliate of Jamia Hafsa. On her bed, her parents had found a burial shroud. When the father went looking for his daughter he was told by another student at the institution that she had left with Umme-Hassan, the head of Jamia Hafsa for that institution.